Want: Revivification

When I was in my early twenties, I did a lot of fainting. This is surprising for two reasons: (1) from a central casting perspective, I look more your standard shrewish fishwife than a swooning rose, and (2) who knew people still fainted in this day and age?

It only happened when I was in a lot of pain—the afternoon I had my wisdom teeth removed, for example—and my doctor gave me a clean bill of health. It was caused by low blood pressure, she said, stemming from my reaction to the pain.

The fainting itself wasn’t so bad; all of a sudden, I simply wasn’t present. It was the lead-up and the recovery that sucked. All the clichés came into play: I felt like throwing up, I got all clammy, and the room spun wildly around me. Losing consciousness actually came as a relief, blotting out the discomfort with blissful, cool blackness. (Ever since, I’ve suspected that dying would feel the same way.) Waking up wasn’t so great. It involved crashing back into life just as I’d left it—sweaty and hurting and unhappy.

Dr. Alexander Youman, ever thoughtful, seems to have sympathy for the fainters among us. “Dashing water over a person in a simple fainting fit is a barbarity,” he wrote in the Dictionary’s chapter on accidents and emergencies. “Yelling out like a savage” is also off the to-do list (although it sounds like fun).

Having lived through the nineteenth century, Dr. Alexander Youman probably knew a thing or two about fainting. WebMD’s entry on the subject mentions the same primary cause, lack of blood flow to the brain, and also says that lying down will usually solve the problem. From my experience, they’re both right on what to do—once I laid down (or fell, as the case may be), I always woke up within a few seconds.

The strange thing about this entry is its specific mention of a fainting man. During Youman’s day, this seems to be the least likely suspect for a good fainting fit: After all, this was the era of the tight-laced corset, which we moderns tend to believe left women swooning nonstop.

Corsets were a fact of life for hundreds of years, but thanks to marvels of engineering and science, the nineteenth-century models were particularly unforgiving. Typically measuring between 18 and 30 inches at the waist, they were worn by everyone from bonbon-eating bons vivants, to women of the working class, to slaves in the American south (and, in modified silhouettes, some men). As seems inevitable in Western society, the point was to wear the smallest size possible, and according to Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History, these constricting foundation garments probably really did cause fainting and other physical ailments, if not quite on the grand scale many people imagine. 

It’s likely that the women around Youman wore corsets, so he must have seen a collapse or two. (According to Steele, 40 percent of Parisian women were estimated to wear corsets in the 1870s. Exact figures aren’t available for the U.S., but corsets were common enough to figure prominently in the discussion of social activists and doctors of the day.) Yet Youman chose to build this entry around a man fainting. Could it be because fainting women were so common, there was nothing more to be said on the topic?

It’s easy to scoff at corsets as antiquated and anti-woman, but our grandchildren may feel the same way about our plastic-surgery-mad culture. Whether you’re 7 or 70, the modern world seems convinced that there’s nothing a scalpel can’t fix.

Corsets themselves are by no means things of the past: they’re easily available online, both because they’ve taken on a naughty appeal, and because some people take their Victoriana obsessions a few steps too far.  And then there’s the whole subculture of genuine waist training, most famously represented by Dita von Teese, modern-day burlesque star and ex-wife of 90s rock star Marilyn Manson. 

Heck. If all corsets were this beautiful, even I’d be tempted.

Want: Horse Hockey

I’ve known a lot of horse people in my life, but I don’t get the animal’s appeal: they’re big, smelly, and vaguely frightening, and I’ve never gotten over feeling cheated by the fact that they don’t actually talk. (Damn you, Mr. Ed.) But for Youman and his contemporaries, horses weren’t a laughing matter: expensive to both buy and keep, they were status symbols that offered serious travel and productivity benefits. Buying or selling a horse was a transaction you didn’t want to screw up, and with the founding of Consumer Reports some 61 long years away, what was the average American to do? Read the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, clearly.

Even knowing that a horse was a major purchase in 1872, today’s entry comes as a bit of a shock. A casual scan of the Dictionary leaves you with the feeling that A. E. Youman was a decent guy. He’s generally a proponent of kindness to animals and children, doesn’t dismiss women or their work as unimportant, and is a tireless advocate for his readers. His calm, straightforward approach to life and its obstacles must have been a source of comfort for the (potentially panicked) folks consulting his book.

But when it comes to buying and selling horses, Youman’s Dudley Do-right facade begins to crack.

(part 1) (part 2)

To be frank, I don’t have a lot of facts to bring to the table on this entry: my knowledge of barnyard animals is largely limited to the fact that they’re often good to eat. I do, however, know the difference between right and wrong, cultural (temporal?) relativism be damned.

Having watched approximately 200 hours worth of McLeod’s Daughters, Australia’s favorite sheep opera, I can say with some confidence that “drenching” the horse as described in “To Cover Up the Heaves” means putting metal shotgun pellets into the horse’s stomach by way of a tube inserted down its throat.

And Youman saves what might be the most upsetting procedure for last—making a horse look young by “puncturing the skin over the cavity [above its eye] and filling through a tube by air from the mouth, and then closing the aperture, when the brow will become smooth—for a time.”

Advice on avoiding dirty tricks would certainly have been helpful to readers of the Dictionary. But I’m not sure that’s what this entry provides: instead, it seems packed with details for conning people out of what they rightfully deserve, and hurting animals in the process. With these techniques you could make a not-so-great horse fabulous, and a fabulous horse not-so-great—or make them look that way long enough for a sale, anyway.

Maybe it’s hypocritical for a meat eater to be repelled by treating an animal like this: just because I didn't kill the chicken I ate for dinner doesn’t mean that I’m not culpable for its death. But this is just dishonest meanness.

Treating people and horses this way doesn’t seem characteristic of kindly grandpa Youman, and I have only the tiniest sliver of hope that his intent was truly to prepare his readers, not help them behave badly. It was a rough world out there, after all. Take a look at these entries for the word “Jockey” in the 1892 Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language.

Want: Un-funny Money

If memory serves, my sophomore American history class covered nothing more than a bunch of grown men bickering about how to back paper money. I’m sure other things came up, but that particular bit of history was so spectacularly, profoundly, mind-numbingly dull that it stands out even all these years later.

In the hands of our dear friend A. E. Youman, though, the finer points of early American currency take on a sense of immediacy. He got to the meat of the issue: Was it real, or was it fake?

In 1860, more than 8,000 American banks were issuing bills. (Everybody but the federal government was at it, it seems.) This made the Civil War era an excellent time to be a forger of paper money in America, if not a user of paper money. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, a third all paper money in circulation in 1865 was counterfeit.

Part of the problem was that each of these 8,000 banks designed its own bills, creating a wild diversity of styles and making it almost impossible to tell what was real. The Coin Site says, “The earliest notes are rather plain but as the need for anti-counterfeiting methods arose, talented artists were employed to create intricate vignettes that were difficult to duplicate. The vignettes are the most attractive to collectors since they show life during the period in which the notes were produced. There are hundreds of scenes, including those representing agriculture, industry and commerce and showing sailing ships, farms, antique trains, geography as well as allegorical representations of Faith, Hope, Justice, Liberty and Peace. The notes are often multi-colored and in high grade, are quite beautiful.”

This counterfeiting free-for-all supposedly ended with the passage of the National Bank Act in 1863—almost 10 years before Youman’s book hit shelves. (After this, banks were still licensed to print money, but the government controlled most of the bill’s design, making them harder to fake.) In 1865, the Secret Service was founded to further control forgery.

These efforts didn’t quite do the job, if we believe Youman. In this 1872(ish) entry, he warns readers not only to check the quality of the bill and its printing, but also to be sure it wasn’t issued by a broken bank—one that had gone belly up, apparently taking with it the currency it had printed. 

(P.S.: If I’d spent as much time on my American history homework as I did on this post, I’d probably be president by now.)